Richter’s oeuvre returns to Paris twelve years later for a conversation on history and memory.
Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton, officially inaugurated in 2014 – with German pioneer of contemporary post-war painting, Gerhard Richter, being among the first artists to be exhibited – now invites audiences to revisit his oeuvre. On display are over two-hundred-and-seventy pieces across nine gallery spaces dedicated to a six-decade long spectacle of Richter’s photorealism and expressionist abstraction. Curated by ex-Tate director Serota and Schwar, fresh from overseeing the Gerhard Richter: Engadin at Hauser & Wirth in 2024; the retrospective explores Richter’s shifting style as much as his personal dialogue with his native Germany’s catastrophic twentieth century history.
Opening in Gallery one with his earliest parkour of photorealism; still echoing the GDR’s enforced “socialist realism”, Richter’s early works exhibit his deliberate shift away from the propagandistic idealism of the style. Notably, his 1964 recreation of Leni Riefenstahl’s photograph of Nubian tribes in Sudan, and 1965 Uncle Rudi which inhabit the space.
His blurred rendering of Riefenstahl’s image hangs with an unsettling detachment. Once celebrated by Hitler, the filmmaker’s authority becomes dissolved into ambiguity — underscoring an, ironically, clear step away from the historical idealism which plagued Rienfenstahl’s era.
Around the corner hangs Richter’s own Uncle Rudi (1965), who stands out amongst his more personal works. The almost oxymoronic familiarity one expresses towards Rudi is deliberately delineated through verwischung, the blur interrupts the image just enough to read the joyous expression on Uncle’s face and spot his NSDAP uniform. The image, however, never fully settles: Richter plays on this in an attempt to visually mirror a historian’s treatise of uncomfortable material, resisting its simplification. He paints memory as something fragile and entirely unreliable. In this work, the familiarity of family memory collides with the horror of historical reality. Richter resists moral resolution; instead, he stages discomfort. Memory, as he depicts it, is unstable, compromised, and persistently unreliable.
I believe the exhibit culminates in gallery five with one of Richter’s most affecting works in his October 18, 1977 cycle: Funeral (1988). Spanning the width of the wall, the painting depicts the burial of the Baader-Meinhof (RAF) members in Stuttgart. The work remains one of Richter’s most consequential engagements with contemporary German trauma. As the RAF had, by the late 1970s, come to embody West Germany’s unresolved tensions: the violence of ideological extremism and the fragility of the postwar democratic state. Members’ deaths were treated, in a sense, like martyrs, which Richter treated more than a decade later – at a historical remove that is crucial to the series’ tone.
In Funeral, the burial scene, unlike his earlier realism, feels funereal in its own right: here, the verwischung permits the subjects to recede further into historical distance, muting any potential drama. Seen within the broader arc of the retrospective, the October 18, 1977 cycle crystallises Richter’s lifelong preoccupation with the instability of historical memory. If Uncle Rudi confronts the inherited guilt of the Nazi past through familial intimacy, Funeral addresses the violence of the postwar generation that sought, however destructively, to confront that legacy.
The later galleries turn primarily to Richter’s abstractions, though, still, often remaining grounded in historical realities. From his September (2005), his muted response to the attacks on the World Trade Center, to the memorial Birkenau (2014) cycle, based on photographs taken inside Auschwitz, the original images are submerged beneath a dense layer of paint. This gesture, though distant from his iconic photorealisms, cannot be deemed evasive. Richter acknowledges the insufficiency of images in the face of historical atrocities, allowing paint itself to register as a medium expressing the limits of memory and historical reflection.The exhibit foregrounds Richter’s sustained meditation on history and memory, situating his practice within Germany’s reflective post-war Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Placing his photorealism in dialogue with his abstraction, the retrospective resists reading his career as a linear progression. Instead, it reveals a continuous inquiry into the fragility of the perceived historical “truths”, affirming Richter as one of modern Germany’s central visual historians.
Image Credit: Taken by Maria Ivanova, Gerhard Richter, Funeral (1988) 200cm x 320cm oil on canvas
